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Consolation on Golgotha: Comforters and Sustainers of Dying Priests in England, 1580–1625

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  24 March 2009

SARAH COVINGTON
SARAH COVINGTON
Affiliation:
Department of History, Queens College, CUNY, 65–30 Kissena Boulevard, Flushing, NY 11367–1597; e-mail: sarah.covington@qc.cuny.edu
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Abstract

The act of comforting soon-to-be executed martyrs was a collective and participatory affair in early modern England, but it was Catholics’ consolation of dying priests that resonated with a sacramental and doctrinal meaning all its own. This article seeks to highlight the late medieval traditions as well as contemporary Tridentine practices that infused such acts of comfort, particularly as they were negotiated in a time of Catholic persecution and upheaval. Of prime importance in instructing consolers, however, was Ignatius of Loyola's Spiritual exercises, which, as this essay argues, provided a guidebook for behaviour and an answer to suffering for priests and followers alike.

Type
Research Article
Information
The Journal of Ecclesiastical History , Volume 60 , Issue 2 , April 2009 , pp. 270 - 293
Copyright
Copyright © 2008 Cambridge University Press

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References

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58 Luisa de Carvajal merits special note not only for the aid she provided – in her will she bequeathed 14,000 ducats for the founding of a novitiate of English religious, which would lead to the establishment, under Robert Persons, of a seminary at Louvain – but also for her direct involvement in the collection and transmission of relics: Margaret A. Rees, The writings of Doña Luisa de Carvajal y Mendoza, Catholic missionary to James I's London, Lewiston, NY 2002, introduction.

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69 Prominent women such as Anne Vaux, the countess of Arundel, Lady Montague and Gertrude Ward also harboured fugitive priests: Arthur F. Marotti, ‘Alienating Catholics in early modern England: recusant women, Jesuits and ideological fantasies’, in Arthur F. Marotti (ed.), Catholicism and anti-Catholicism in early modern English texts, New York 1999, 3–34.

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71 John Dauncey, The history of the thrice illustrious princess Henrietta Maria de Bourbon, queen of England, London 1660 (Wing D293). See also Dolan, Frances E., ‘Gender and the “Lost' spaces of Catholicism”’, Journal of Interdisciplinary History xxxii (2002), 72Google Scholar.

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76 See, for example, Henriette Peters, Mary Ward: a world in contemplation, trans. Helen Butterworth, Leominster 1994, and Jeanne Cover, Love the driving force: Mary Ward's spirituality: its significance for moral theology, Milwaukee 1997.

77 Acts of English martyrs, 342.

78 Equally telling was one gentleman, who ‘like Veronica in another Via Dolorosa, most courteously wiped his face, all splattered with mire and dirt, “for which charity,” says the priest who saw the deed, “may God reward and bless him”’: ibid. 351.

79 See Thomas McCoog, ‘“Sparrows on a rooftop”: “How we live where we live” in Elizabethan England’, in T. M. Lucas (ed.), Spirit story: essays honoring John W. Padburg, S.J., Chicago 2002, 237–64.

80 See Walsham, ‘Translating Trent,’ 295–6.

81 Ibid. 167–8.

82 John Gerard, The autobiography of a hunted priest, trans. Philip Caraman, New York 1965, 49–50.

83 Louis Martz, The poetry of meditation, New Haven 1954, esp. ch. v. See also Pierre Janelle, Robert Southwell the writer, London 1971, ch. vi.

84 When Crashaw thus wrote of tears in metallurgical terms as molten ‘warm silver show'rs’ or ‘her richest pearles, I mean thy tears’, he was not simply evoking metaphysical incongruities or conceits, but summoning the language, however jarring, appropriate to tears as a transformative, alchemical and grace-imbued substance – or, in Richard Rambuss's words, ‘metaphorizing spiritual processes and truths into viscerally charged somatic displays or emblems’. As Rambuss has argued, against Barbara Lewalski and others, Crashaw's rhetorical extremes in this and other poems capture a kind of ‘baroque vertigo’ that reflects the ‘weird and lurid’ qualities embedded within Christianity itself; moreover, tears for the poet have not merely material or bodily qualities but spiritual and intellectual aspects too, uniting them all in a fully incarnational manner: ‘Sacred subjects and the aversive metaphysical conceit’, English Literary History lvvii (2004), 497–530.

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